Social Media Posting Guidelines [Free Download]

I knew that a lot of organizations don’t know where to start in terms of a social media posting strategy. I also knew that we could use a constant reference ourselves. For this reason, I created this one-page social media posting guide to serve as a helpful free resource to anyone on the web. Feel free to download or share this online or off, we just ask that you follow the instructions for sharing at the bottom of the guide.

The guidance here is for regular organizations that do not have full time social media staff or unlimited resources and thus aims for maximum impact with the limited time you have. Scroll down past the guide to view links to official translations and other useful information.

FAQ: What time zone do the recommended times apply to? For those of you in the United States that have a national audience, you will want to use Eastern time as this is where nearly half (48%) of the US population lives (Eastern + Central = 81%). If your audience is primarily local or regional, treat it as local time.

Planning and Scheduling
For those of you who are interested in a breakout of the planning and scheduling components of this resource, I’ve summarized them below.

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About author

Craig specializes in strategy, systems, and metrics. He enjoys cross-pollinating ideas from the nonprofit, government, and business sectors (all of which he's worked in). In addition to heading up topnonprofits.com, his passions include technology, books, social causes, and the global church.

137 comments

[…] 21, 2012 | No comments | Marketing, Resources, Technology Top Nonprofits recently shared a free downloadable social media guide with great tips for churches with limited time and resources. Here are some […]

[…] Top NonProfits has assembled a list of do’s, don’ts and helps to aid you in your questions about posting practices. Who is your audience? How do you plan your content? What are some facebook and twitter posting best practices? Download this free guide. […]

Good question. You’re not the first person to ask this. “Batching” means taking a series of things that are normally done separately and grouping them together to increase efficiency. In this context it means sitting down for a 15 min to 2 hours block of time (or more if necessary) each week and creating and scheduling the most important content to ensure you consistently post at least the recommended minimums. This saves time and increases productivity and effectiveness. Without the stress of constantly looking for that next tweet, you are freed up to monitor and engage at a higher level. If you come up with more content, great. But the important thing is that you don’t HAVE to if you’ve already got the bases covered. I’m working on some more resources that will help with this process so be sure to sign up to be notified http://topnonprofits.wufoo.com/forms/q7x3z9/

That was the hope when it was created, but the positive response has been overwhelming. Thanks Vinod!

BTW, let me know if you’re interested in doing a case study post on Topnonprofits.com. I dig what little I’ve seen of Karma Store, and a real world example of how you helped a nonprofit would likely be helpful to all involved. If interested, shoot an email to craig(at)topnonprofits(dot)com.

Hey Craig, saw your last reply earlier. I am definitely interested in doing a client case study. I was about to shoot you an email, but got caught up with some other stuff. I will ping you later this evening to discuss.

Hi we are social media exchange from Beirut, we are very interested in this and we want to translate it to Arabic to be able to use it in Arabic language trainings on social media that we usually do for NGOs and civil society in Lebanon and the Arab region, but the license is keeping us from doing that, so is it possible to do that as long as we stay true to the content? Many Thanks

That would be awesome! We’re already creating official translations in Czech, Dutch, and French with Spanish and several other languages in the works. Please email me at craig(at)topnonprofits(dot)com so we can work out the details of creating an official translation. Excited!

Download a browser extension and pin straight from websites
Don’t just cherry pick though, do your own leg work.
Follow links of images you like
There are often other goodies you can share directly from that linked page.

[…] loves practical cheat sheets too. So, I’m always on the hunt for good ones. I found this posting guide from Top Nonprofits — and really liked it and added it to my Pinterest Content Strategy board. Yesterday, I […]

Craig, this chart makes great sense for pushes your message in to social media. However, that is only using half of the capacity. Nonprofits are definitionally social and will do damage to themselves and their brands if they do not behave in a way that engages with their communities. The reason why social media is interesting is because… well… it is social. It goes two way. Would be great to add to this chart the best practices on listening and engaging. This is valuable not only from a selfish brand enhancement perspective but also from the perspective of program advancement.

I totally agree, the first time around I tried including this but there just wasn’t enough room to cover everything on a standard sized page (critical for ease of printing). The fact that I called this a “posting guide” and not a social media guide wasn’t by mistake. 🙂 I’ve got a few sister guides to this one up my sleeve.

[…] Op Social Media Handleiding, is an official translation of Craig Van Korlaar’s Social Media Posting Guide and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License, […]

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[…] I recently came across a tip sheet from a writer named Craig Van Korlaar with simple suggestions for how congregations can effectively manage social media. I found it helpful, so I wanted to pass it along. You can find the guide at: https://topnonprofits.com/posting-guide/. […]

[…] Kanter (@kanter) is someone I’ve looked up to for years. So when she shared an image of my Social Media Posting Guide on her Facebook page I was honored, to say the least. But neither of us expected what would happen […]

Twitter does have a solid and faithful user base and following, but they’ll need to continue to morph and evolve.It’s simplicity and limits are both a benefit and a constraint. The decision to extend its functionality towards being more of an engagement platform and/or embedding its core functionality into already existing and emerging platforms are two potential paths of action to extend growth

[…] If you’re like me, you could use a constant reference tool. For this reason, the folks at Top NonProfits created this one-page social media posting guide to serve as a helpful free resource to anyone on […]

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